ACED – African Center for Equitable Development Equitable

• Producing and adapting knowledge aligned with the needs of decision-makers, practitioners and communities.
  Facilitating access to and understanding of decision-relevant data and analysis.

• Embedding knowledge use sustainably in policies and programmes through institutional mechanisms.

• Demonstrating concrete results on decent jobs, gender equality and wellbeing through better-informed decisions.

ACED was founded in 2010 in Benin by three students (Olga Abloutan, Donald Houessou and Frejus Thoto) driven to address local communities’ development challenges, initially through direct field action such as youth agri-entrepreneurship support and community mobilisation on climate adaptation.

Seeking continuous impact improvement, ACED progressively built an action-research approach linking knowledge production, field learning and collective action, revealing a structural challenge: despite growing knowledge production, it remains too rarely used by public decision-makers and development practitioners.

ACED has since positioned itself as a bridge between knowledge production, community action and public policy-making, adopting an integrated, non-linear approach linking research, policy and field action to foster the uptake and use of knowledge in decision-making – shaping its current mission of making knowledge relevant, accessible and genuinely used.